The guy who wrote Windows Solitaire did it as an intern and never made any royalties on it

One of the most popular computer games of all time, the
25-year-old Windows Solitaire, was written by an intern named Wes
Cherry who was never paid for it, or given royalties of any
kind.

The history of Solitaire has been one of the stories that
surfaces now and then.

It came to light on Monday when someone on Reddit posted a
"where is he now" update on Cherry, noting that these days he's
into apples — and not the technology kind, but the kind you eat.

He owns Dragons Head Cider, an apple orchard and apple cider
producer on an island west of Seattle. The post
went crazy on reddit and temporarily crashed the Dragons Head
website.

Someone sent Cherry a Facebook message telling him his
website had been slammed by Reddit and so he jumped
on the thread and wound up telling the Windows Solitaire
story again including Microsoft's internal company "Bogus
Software":

I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at
Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I had played a similar
solitaire game on the Mac instead of studying for finals at
college and wanted a version for myself on Windows...

At the time there was an internal "company within a company"
called Bogus software. It was really just a server where bunch of
guys having fun hacking Windows to learn about the API tossed
their games.

A program manager on the Windows team saw it and decided to
include it in Windows 3.0. It was made clear that they wouldn't
pay me other than supplying me with an IBM XT to fix some bugs
during the school year — I was perfectly fine with it and I am to
this day.

He also created a Windows version of another popular game
back in the day called Pipe Dream. This one was included in one
of the bundles of software known as a "Microsoft
Entertainment pack." He was "paid a few thousand bucks in
stock for that," he said.

If he held onto that stock over the years, it would have done
well for him. Microsoft created
many a millionaire employee from the crew that worked for the
company in the 1990s. And he went on to work for Microsoft
after his internship, working on the Excel team.

Remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft was THE tech company to work
for, like Google or Facebook is today. Employees were well paid,
got stock, and did quite alright.

Still, every few
decades people talk about how the intern who
wrote Solitaire never made money on it.

The running joke that is that if everyone who has ever played
sent him a penny, he'd be rich enough to hang out with Bill
Gates.

All through the years, he's kept his sense of humor about that.
On Monday's he quipped:

A few people have paid me 'a penny' as a joke. I'd get them in
the mail, or in person if someone introduced me as the author of
Solitaire and the obligatory no royalties conversation came up. I
think I'm up to about 8 cents now.